ITECH5403 – Comparative Programming Languages
School of Science, Engineering and Information Technology

CRICOS Provider No. 00103D Page 1 of 10
ITECH5403 - Assignment 2 – Parallel Implementations
Due Date: 5pm, Friday of Week 11
This assignment will test your skills in programming applications to specification in a number of different
programming languages, and is worth 20% of your non-invigilated (type A) marks for this course.
Assignment Overview

You are tasked with creating a text-based program for storing data on Hotel Room Bookings - however, as this
is a comparative languages course, you will be creating the same application in the following three programming
languages:
• Java,

• Python, and

• Lisp

As you implement the application in each language you should keep notes on:
- The features of the languages used,
- Which features you found useful, and
- Any issues or complications which arose due to the complexity or lack of any language features.
A brief discussion document based on these programming features for each individual language accompanying
each implementation is required. Finally, a comparative overview of the languages highlighting how they were
suitable or not suitable for the creating this type of application is also required.
It is recommended that the first version of the application you write is in the programming language which is
most familiar to you. This will help you to have a working 'template' for storing room bookings which you can
then translate into the other programming languages.
Program Specification

When the program first launches, there is a menu which allows the user to select one of the following five
options:
1.) Add a guest
2.) Add a room
3.) Add a booking
4.) View bookings
5.) Quit

The functionality of these options is as follows:
ITECH5403 – Comparative Programming Languages
School of Science, Engineering and Information Technology

CRICOS Provider No. 00103D Page 2 of 10

1.) When users add a guest they provide a name which is stored in some manner of array or list. Guests
are assigned a unique ID value where the first guest added is assigned the ID value 1, the second guest
added is assigned the ID value 2 and so on.

2.) When users add a room they provide a room number and a room capacity (i.e. how many people can
stay in the room at any one time) which is stored in some manner of array or list. Rooms have a property
which indicates if they are booked or not for any given date – please see the Room Booking Dates
section below for some guidance on the easiest way to implement this.

3.) When users add a booking they provide a guest ID, room number, the number of guests staying and
finally a check-in date and check-out date.

To successfully create a room booking:

• The guest ID must be a guest which is registered on the system,

• The room number must be of a room that exists,

• The room must be able to accommodate the number of people in the booking (i.e. if the room
capacity is for 2 people and the booking has 4 people staying then the booking must be
refused), and finally

• The room must be available on the dates requested.

4.) When users views bookings they have the option to:
a. View guest bookings, or
b. View room bookings.
If the user opts to show guest bookings then they are prompted to enter the guest ID - and then any
bookings made by that guest are displayed including:
- The guest’s name,
- Which room number they booked & number of guests staying, and
- The check-in and check-out dates.
If the user opts to show room bookings then they are prompted to enter a room number - and then any
bookings for that room within the current year are displayed, including:
- The guest’s name,
- The number of guests staying, and
- The check-in and check-out dates.
5.) When a user chooses to Quit the program terminates with a goodbye message.
Each implementation of your project (in each of the three languages you choose) should aim to closely match
the setup and structure of the program as shown in the example output on the following pages.
ITECH5403 – Comparative Programming Languages
School of Science, Engineering and Information Technology

CRICOS Provider No. 00103D Page 3 of 10
You may wish create separate Guest, Room and potentially Booking classes as part of your implementations,
but you do not have to.

You may also wish to add code to pre-create a number of guests, rooms and bookings on each run of your code
to avoid the need to type in these details over and over when testing your program. If you do so, please
comment out these pre-defined entries before submitting your assignment.
Room Booking Dates

Dates can be a complex subject to do correctly in programming because we often want to calculate how many
days are between dates, and there are issues like date formats (dd/mm/yy? mm/dd/yyyy?) to consider as well
as leap years where February has 29 days instead of the usual 28 and so on.

Some programming languages come with built-in classes to work with dates – and you may use them if you
wish. In fact, you are encouraged to use them as they are precisely what you would use when working in the
real world, so experience in them now will increase your programming knowledge!

However, to keep things simple, our room booking system will only allow bookings within the current year, and
the easiest way to do that is to store dates as the number of the day between 1 and 365. So, day 18 would be
the 18th of January (which has 31 days), day 32 would be the 1st of February, and so on.
As such, one way to keep track of whether a room is booked or not for a current day would be for each room
to have an array of 365 boolean values which are all set to false (i.e. room is not booked for that particular day)
when the room is first created.
Then, because users don’t like entering dates as values between 1 and 365, we could have four utility methods:

- int dateToDayNumber(int month, int day),
- int dayNumberToMonth(int dayNumber),
- int dayNumberToDayOfMonth(int dayNumber), and
- bool setBooked(int startDayNumber, int endDayNumber).

Example code for the first tree of these methods, written in a Java-like syntax, is provided on the following page – you
should write the setBooked method yourself. The above setBooked method signature assumes you are running the
method on a Room object – if you are not, then you will also have to pass in the room number so you know which
room’s booked array to modify!
The setBooked method should check if the room is booked for each day between the start and end dates (inclusive) to
ensure the room is available. If the room is not available on a day the method returns false, but if the room is available
between the start and end dates then it should be set to booked for each day requested and the method should return
true to indicate success.
Bookings are not required to have booking ID values assigned to them, but you may add them if you wish as they may
be useful to later functionality.

ITECH5403 – Comparative Programming Languages
School of Science, Engineering and Information Technology

CRICOS Provider No. 00103D Page 4 of 10
int dateToDayNumber(int month, int day) {
// Catch invalid input and return early
if (month < 1 || month > 12 || day < 1 || day > 31) return 0;

if (month == 1 ) return day;
if (month == 2 ) return 31 + day;
if (month == 3 ) return 59 + day;
if (month == 4 ) return 90 + day;
if (month == 5 ) return 120 + day;
if (month == 6 ) return 151 + day;
if (month == 7 ) return 181 + day;
if (month == 8 ) return 212 + day;
if (month == 9 ) return 243 + day;
if (month == 10) return 273 + day;
if (month == 11) return 304 + day;
return 334 + day;
}

int dayNumberToMonth(int dayNumber) {
// Catch invalid input and return early
if (dayNumber < 1 || dayNumber > 365) return 0;

if (dayNumber <= 31 ) return 1; // Jan
if (dayNumber <= 59 ) return 2; // Feb
if (dayNumber <= 90 ) return 3; // Mar
if (dayNumber <= 120) return 4; // Apr
if (dayNumber <= 151) return 5; // May
if (dayNumber <= 181) return 6; // Jun
if (dayNumber <= 212) return 7; // Jul
if (dayNumber <= 243) return 8; // Aug
if (dayNumber <= 273) return 9; // Sep
if (dayNumber <= 304) return 10; // Oct
if (dayNumber <= 334) return 11; // Nov
return 12; // Dec
}

int dayNumberToDayOfMonth(int dayNumber) {
// Catch invalid input and return early
if (dayNumber < 1 || dayNumber > 365) return 0;

if (dayNumber <= 31 ) return dayNumber; // Jan
if (dayNumber <= 59 ) return dayNumber - 31; // Feb
if (dayNumber <= 90 ) return dayNumber - 59; // Mar
if (dayNumber <= 120) return dayNumber - 90; // Apr
if (dayNumber <= 151) return dayNumber - 120; // May
if (dayNumber <= 181) return dayNumber - 151; // Jun
if (dayNumber <= 212) return dayNumber - 181; // Jul
if (dayNumber <= 243) return dayNumber - 212; // Aug
if (dayNumber <= 273) return dayNumber - 243; // Sep
if (dayNumber <= 304) return dayNumber - 273; // Oct
if (dayNumber <= 334) return dayNumber - 304; // Nov
return dayNumber - 334; // Dec
}

ITECH5403 – Comparative Programming Languages
School of Science, Engineering and Information Technology

CRICOS Provider No. 00103D Page 5 of 10
Example Program Output
Startup and add guest example output
-----------------------------------------------
------ Welcome to FedUni Hotel Bookings -------
-----------------------------------------------
Main Menu - please select an option:
1.) Add guest
2.) Add room
3.) Add booking
4.) View bookings
5.) Quit
1
Please enter guest name:
Alan
Guest Alan has been created with guest ID: 1
Would you like to [A]dd a new guest or [R]eturn to the previous menu?
A
Please enter guest name:
Brenda
Guest Brenda has been created with guest ID: 2
Would you like to [A]dd a new guest or [R]eturn to the previous menu?
R

Add room example output
Main Menu - please select an option:
1.) Add guest
2.) Add room
3.) Add booking
4.) View bookings
5.) Quit
2
Please enter room number:
101
Please enter room capacity:
2
Would you like to [A]dd a new room or [R]eturn to the previous menu?
A
Please enter room number:
101
Room already exists. Please enter room number:
202
Please enter room capacity:
5
Would you like to [A]dd a new room or [R]eturn to the previous menu?
R
ITECH5403 – Comparative Programming Languages
School of Science, Engineering and Information Technology

CRICOS Provider No. 00103D Page 6 of 10
Add booking example output
Main Menu - please select an option:
1.) Add guest
2.) Add room
3.) Add booking
4.) View bookings
5.) Quit
3
Please enter guest ID:
99
Guest does not exist.
Please enter guest ID:
1
Please enter room number:
66
Room does not exist.
Please enter room number:
101
Please enter number of guests:
3
Guest count exceeds room capacity of: 2
Please enter room number:
202
Please enter number of guests:
3
Please enter check-in month:
15
Invalid month. Please enter check-in month:
8
Please enter check-in day:
55
Invalid day. Please enter check-in day:
28
Please enter check-out month:
8
Please enter check-out day:
30
*** Booking successful! ***

Would you like to [A]dd a new booking or [R]eturn to the previous menu?
A
Please enter guest ID:
2
Please enter room number:
202
Please enter number of guests:
1
Please enter check-in month:
8
Please enter check-in day:
Program should
check for valid
data entry and
loop until valid
data is entered!
ITECH5403 – Comparative Programming Languages
School of Science, Engineering and Information Technology

CRICOS Provider No. 00103D Page 7 of 10
29
Please enter check-out month:
8
Please enter check-out day:
30
Room is not available during that period. Please enter new room number:
101
*** Booking successful! ***
View bookings example output
Main Menu - please select an option:
1.) Add guest
2.) Add room
3.) Add booking
4.) View bookings
5.) Quit
4
Would you like to view [G]uest bookings, [R]oom booking, or e[X]it?
G
Please enter guest ID:
99
Guest does not exist. Please enter guest ID:
1
Guest 1 : Alan
Booking : Room 202, 3 guest(s) from 08/28 to 08/30.
Would you like to view [G]uest bookings, [R]oom booking, or e[X]it?
R
Please enter room number:
999
Room does not exist. Please enter room number:
101
Room 101 bookings:
Guest 2 – Brenda, 1 guest(s) from 08/29 to 08/30.
Would you like to view [G]uest bookings, [R]oom booking, or e[X]it?
X
Quit example output

Main Menu - please select an option:
1.) Add guest
2.) Add room
3.) Add booking
4.) View bookings
5.) Quit
5

Thanks for using FedUni Hotel Bookings!
ITECH5403 – Comparative Programming Languages
School of Science, Engineering and Information Technology

CRICOS Provider No. 00103D Page 8 of 10
Suggested Development Environments

NetBeans for Java
NetBeans may be freely downloaded from: https://netbeans.org/
NetBeans does not come with the Java JDK, which must the downloaded separately from:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html
PyCharm or IDLE for Python
Python, including the IDLE development environment can be downloaded freely from:
https://www.python.org/downloads/
PyCharm Community Edition can be downloaded freely from: https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/

GNU CLisp for Common Lisp
CLISP 2.49 can be obtained from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/clisp/files/latest/download
Any good text editor would be suitable for writing the source code.




Additional Documentation – Language Suitability Report

Every programming language is designed to be used for different types of tasks, and has features which allow
it to be a good choice for those tasks, while perhaps not as good at different types of tasks.
During your implementation of the program in each of the languages chosen you should make notes about
the language features which exist or do not exist, and which have therefore made program development
easier or more difficult.
Where a language has not provided a feature which would have been useful to the implementation of the
program, or where the complexity of using a language feature has been high you should remark upon it and
briefly discuss a mechanism or feature of another language which would have made development easier.
After completing the application in all languages (or as many as you can), discuss the comparative ease of
implementation in terms of the design, implementation and debugging for each programming language,
including how robustness issues were addressed.
ITECH5403 – Comparative Programming Languages
School of Science, Engineering and Information Technology

CRICOS Provider No. 00103D Page 9 of 10
Submission and Marking Process

You must supply your program source code files and language suitability report documentation in as single
compressed archive called:
ITECH5403_Assignment_2__.zip
You may supply your programming language suitability report in either Word or LibreOffice/OpenOffice format
in which the document can be edited – no proprietary Mac specific formats, please.
Assignments will be marked on the basis of fulfilment of the requirements and the quality of the work. In
addition to the marking criteria, marks may be deducted for failure to comply with the assignment
requirements, including (but not limited to):
• Incomplete implementation(s), and
• Incomplete submissions (e.g. missing files), and
• Poor spelling and grammar.

Submit your assignment (all program source files plus your discussion document) to the Assignment 2 Upload
location on Moodle before the deadline of Friday of week 11 at 5pm.
The mark distribution for this assignment is explained on the next page.















ITECH5403 – Comparative Programming Languages
School of Science, Engineering and Information Technology

CRICOS Provider No. 00103D Page 10 of 10
Assignment 2 – Parallel Implementations
Student Name: Student ID:
Requirement Weight Mark
Implementation 1: Java
- Functionality,
- Adherence to the specification,
- Robustness / input handling.

10


Implementation 2: Python
- Functionality,
- Adherence to the specification,
- Robustness / input handling.

10


Implementation 3: Lisp
- Functionality,
- Adherence to the specification,
- Robustness / input handling.


10


Documentation and discussion of the comparative ease of implementation (design /
implement / debug) in each programming language, including how robustness issues were
addressed.

10

Spelling and grammar 5

Assignment mark total

/ 45

Contribution to unit mark (out of 20%)

%

Comments: